Journal Your Job-Search Journey on Your Facebook Wall

Use Facebook as a platform to share your job-seeking progress with friends and family. Let them know what steps you took that week to find work. Share interesting insights about yourself or about job seeking in general. Celebrate your successes, like having finished your résumé or getting a callback from a target hiring manager.

Ironically, sometimes the people closest to you are more reluctant to help. But if you post about your job-seeking journey so that friends and family can see how committed you are to finding a better position, then they may be more serious about offering to support you and make introductions for you.

That’s exactly what happened for a client who had a history of job-hopping on Wall Street. His behavior wasn’t a problem before the market crashed. But when the job market got very competitive with many brokers out of work, his reputation caught up with him.

His friends and family had been disappointed with his inability to settle down, and so they were unwilling to risk their own reputations to help him out. He used Facebook to start journaling his progress and through targeted Wall posts he was able to reinforce his commitment.

Slowly, his friends’ and family’s resistance wore down and they began to see him in a better light. In the end, it was an introduction on Facebook that landed him his next position.